This powerful novel of three generations of black men bound by blood --
and by histories of mutual love, fear, and frustration -- gives author
Leonard Pitts the opportunity to explore the painful truths of black
men's lives, especially as they play out in the fraught relations of
fathers and sons. As 50-year-old Mo tries to reach out to his
increasingly tuned-out son Trey (who himself has become an unwed
teenaged father), he realizes that the burden of grief and anger he
carries over his own estranged father has everything to do with the
struggles he encounters with his son. Part road novel, part character
study, and part social critique, and written in compulsively readable
prose, Before I Forget is the work of a major new voice in American
fiction. Pitts knows inside and out the difficulties facing black men as
they grapple with the complexities of their roles as fathers.